/ best free open source web resources /

It’s that wonderful time of the year. We get together with family and we eat too much. We also come across some deals in WordPress space that are simply too good to pass up.

You don’t have to stand in line (did we mention it’s supposed to rain) for hours on end either. After this, you barely have energy enough to rush to the aisle with your Black Friday deal.

Are you looking for deals for designers and developers? You can get the deal you want from wherever you happen to be sitting. This is a deal that includes tools and discounted themes, classes, and more.

Any of the following could be just what you need to get you settled firmly into the holiday spirit!

Elementor’s plans are already a good deal. At 25% off, we’re talking about a very, very good deal when you take into account everything this web design tool has to offer. That’s your Black Friday bonus. There’s another bonus you get with Elementor that isn’t tied to any special promotion.

You’ll appreciate that extra bonus when you start creating websites with Elementor and find you can build what you want without getting “stuck” in a theme’s design. You’ll never have to write code either.

Elementor features crazy-fast performance, it works with any template, and you get all the benefits of live, frontend editing. Your workflow will speed up significantly, and even more so it you opt for the Pro version with its visual form builder, form integrations, menu builder, and custom CSS features. Elementor is developer friendly too!

The basic plan for this open source page builder is free, but this is a great time to take advantage of one of Elementor’s souped-up plans which you can get at a discount. Read the rest of this entry »

Every job has its ups and downs, but that doesn’t mean you have to live with every one of the downs. Getting started on a new assignment is almost always a thrill. Before you get too far into it, little problems make their presence known.

The net result can be like a wild ride on an emotional rollercoaster. Enter the magic kingdom of pre-built websites. All the problems you typically face won’t necessarily be eliminated. But most of them including those that cause the most pain and trouble will be.

When everything begins to move along smoothly DO NOT PANIC!! There’s nothing wrong with you. With pre-built websites, it’s simply the way it’s supposed to be – from here on out.

A (Very) Brief Tutorial

What is it about pre-built websites that makes site building proceed so smoothly?

Let’s first visit the source.

BeTheme is a top resource for pre-built websites. It’s been a top 5 ThemeForest seller for years and it currently offers 380+ of these pre-built websites.

Consequently, it’s easy to find a theme to match any website type you have in mind. Plus, each pre-built website is customizable. The bottom line is that you can have a website ready to go in as little as 4 hours. This is without having to put up with the usual pains and problems.

Here’s why.

The 5 Most Common Web Design Pains Pre-built Websites can Eliminate

The Pain Associated with Not Knowing the Market

“Unique” barely describes the niche your newest client belongs to. How do you get a handle on the market? You can (a) take days to research it, or (b) browse Be’s catalog of pre-built websites.

We suggest opting for “b”. Pick one that’s close, you should be able to customize it to cover any niche.

Ecology, pets, and tech-based designs are each broad enough to start with. All you need to do is a little tweaking and add the necessary details to make your client a happy client.

Some clients already know which color or color palette will be best, and some will leave it up to you. Still others pick their favorite color, whether it’s a good match for their specific niche or not. That can be painful to you the designer, and that pain can extend to design choices beyond those of color.

Pre-built websites adhere to industry standards. Thus, you have a built-in argument you can use to help your client make a proper choice. This is whether the subject is color or content architecture.

Prototype tools play key roles in website and mobile app design and development. They do so by providing enhanced opportunities for project leaders, teams, and stakeholders. Specifically, the allow them to better communicate with one another.

A prototype can emulate a proposed software solution in significant detail. It can present it perfectly in terms of its intended look and feel. A wireframe provides a more basic version of a proposed solution. It allows interested parties to focus on its functionality.

How to maximize the potential benefits you can receive from prototyping and wireframing? You should invest in the best app and website prototyping tools you can get your hands on. We’ve researched three such tools. We present them to you here, having taken into account the following criteria:

The ability of the tool to accurately portray visual and interactive design.

When you have UI prototyping tools for websites and applications as part of your design toolkit you’re in a better position to validate web or app designs early on and receive important feedback when it will do the most good.

Justinmind is such a tool. It is an all-in-one prototyping tool that provides all the functionality you need to show clients and stakeholders how your design is progressing, and what the look, feel, and functionality of the finished product will be prior to handing the design over to the developer.

Justinmind does not rely on coding. You simply work with and piece together its more than 4,000 pre-made UI elements, interactions, transitions, and gestures to build a prototype that’s for all practical purposes indistinguishable from the real thing.

Other top app and website prototyping tools don’t necessarily integrate with other web design tools. Justinmind does precisely that and works with real data as well to build prototypes that you can test on any device.

A website can be a powerful marketing tool for a startup or a small business. But only if it is easy to work with and well designed. It should also incorporate functionality specific to the needs of the business. WordPress business themes make building a website for a business very easy. During the past years, the process was slow, tedious, and expensive, however.

WordPress offers themes that go well with startups too. Is your startup working on a new app or presenting a new service? Or is it involved in some other not-yet-commonplace venture? Either way, there are likely multiple themes that are a good match. Especially so in the following collection.

The following WP themes are the best at what they do. You can rely on them to help you create websites that will stand out from the crowd.

Be Theme is an excellent theme to start with. It is in all likelihood the largest of the WordPress themes for business websites with its collection of more than 370 expertly-designed pre-built websites and its 40 core website-building features.

What makes Be Theme such a suitable choice for small businesses and startups goes beyond the sheer number of pre-built websites and the variety of business types and niches they address. The fact that they are customizable and feature the functionality a business needs and expects in its online presence makes finding a perfect match a relatively easy proposition.

Since more pre-built websites are added to the collection every month, finding the best match is only going to get easier. Add the fact that Be Theme is easy to work with, its SEO-friendly and responsive, and features an extensive array of design elements, layout options, and special effects, it’s understandable why this WP theme has consistently placed among ThemeForest’s top 5 best sellers.

Astra is another of the best WordPress business themes on the market. It provides an ideal set of tools for creating websites for blogs, portfolios, startups and small businesses. Astra offers a variety of templates and a comprehensive collection of design features.

You can use this theme with any of the popular page builders, plus it’s WooCommerce ready and its capabilities are easily expandable with addons.

One reason The100 finds a spot in our list of the best WordPress business themes is the tender loving care that obviously went into its development; TLC that’s reflected in the small business websites it helps to create.

You can see it in The100’s elegant design, attractive demos that can be imported with a single click, and its flexibility and ease of use. Read the rest of this entry »

Web development is a dynamic, rewarding profession. Web developers constantly face challenges, most of which they welcome. There are some challenges however they would prefer to do without. Having to devote excessive time to necessary but repetitive tasks is one of them. Not having the best tools on hand to easily tackle certain technical issues is another.

Fortunately, there are tools and services available to help individual developers or teams. These can help them either work through these challenges or avoid them completely.

The solutions presented here are just what you need. They are based on site rankings, user reviews, and the overall value they offer or provide.

When it’s necessary to track and manage every aspect of a team’s work, which is always the case for large or complex projects, the best solution is typically a visual one and one that resides on a single, centralized platform.

That’s precisely what monday.com offers. This visual team management tool is amazingly easy to work with, it’s equally suitable for teams of 2 or 3 or teams of 2 or 3 thousand (or more). monday.com is extremely popular with teams that are not technically oriented due to its ease of use and its features and capabilities that provide alternatives to spreadsheets, whiteboards, and frequent (and excessively long) meetings.

More than half of its 35,000 paying teams fall into the non-technical category. What tech and non-tech teams like best about this team management tool is the way in which it connects people to processes. monday.com empowers its users, promotes transparency and team collaboration, and boosts collective productivity.

Waypoints is a free library of programming tools you can download and put to immediate use. It is an especially valuable resource to have if you are looking for an efficient and effective way to incorporate various useful features into your apps or web pages.

Scrolling animations, sticky elements, and other recent design trends are quite popular and they can create challenges for programmers who do not yet have the tools to incorporated them into their programs.

Waypoint’s Shortcut section provides the scripts for these design trends and others. These scripts can be packaged into ready-made extensions. Waypoints gives you an effective way to trigger a function of interest when you’ve scrolled to an element on a layout or page.

WordPress is seen as the ultimate website building platform for a reason. Its design team was determined to create a perfect website builder. They wanted to create a builder that allows web designers to tweak and adjust their sites any way they want. Thanks to WordPress, users do not have to work around restrictions or limitations.

It’s not simply the WordPress building platform that can make life easy for a typical designer. It’s also the tools and services that are either compatible with WordPress. Some of them have been specifically created for use with it.

It’s the growing number of these tools and services that makes life exciting for designers. It does so by giving them the ability to continually advance the art of building a better website.

Elementor is an excellent example of the thinking that led to the creation of WordPress: open source, developer oriented and created with the best coding standards in mind. Its creators’ goal was to produce a tool that would let you build anything you want, without restrictions and without coding.

The degree to which they’ve succeeded can be measured in terms of its popularity. Starting with a handful of users when first released two years ago, this free, open source page builder now boasts a user base of over 1 million active installs – a major milestone that has never been achieved. The Elementor live frontend editor enables its users to create stunning websites, while offering a super-fast experience and workflow. It also works with any theme or template. You can build a website from scratch, use one of the 130 designer-made templates in Elementor’s library, use your own template, or import a template.

Elementors recently introduced series of advanced features and integrations takes website building to a new level. At the same time, its user’s favorite features have either been retained or enhanced.

Brizy is another free website builder that will enable you to visually build websites with a minimum of effort. No designer or developer skills are needed to use Brizy, nor is there any need for code.

What its users seem to like most is its ease of use combined with its friendly UX. Despite the wealth of tools and options available to designers and developers, Brizy’s user interface is clutter free and free of distractions as well. All the options are right there where you need them.

Designers have a library of more than 4,000 icons and both designers and developers will appreciate the 150-premade blocks that help to get a project underway. Developers can even create a page on Brizy’s website and save and use the HTML for any purpose, for free. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s an awful lot of dull, unattractive websites out there that are in dire need of upgrading or total redesign. The owners of those websites are either unaware of the problem or hesitant to ask how much redesign would cost. Web designers would of course welcome the work, even though most would prefer spending their time designing websites from scratch since it would often be quicker, easier, and therefore more lucrative.

There’s a difficult, time-consuming way to redesign a website, and there’s also a fast-forward way using pre-built websites that can do the job just as well, and usually better.

Be Theme, with its collection of 350+ pre-built websites can show you the way, starting with the following examples.

Express Redesign

Here are 7 different ways to make an otherwise dull and uninteresting website really sparkle and take on a modern, trendy look and feel. Use Be Theme’s pre-built websites as the fastest way to implement any or all these approaches.

Express Redesign #1: Make a Run-of-the-Mill Website Dynamic

When you stop to consider that the average visitor takes about 3 seconds max to decide whether to spend more time browsing a website, a dynamic homepage is one way to convince a visitor to stick around to see what the internal pages offer.

It’s important to place dynamic images, videos, or animations above the fold as shown in the 3 following examples or they may never be seen.

If your choice is a video, be sure to place the Play button front and center or at least presented in a way that invites the visitor to click on it.

Now that you have a dynamic home page, the next step is to ensure the rest of the visitor’s journey will also be appealing.

Express Redesign #2: Refresh the Color Scheme

Refreshing a website’s color scheme is one of the easiest improvements to make and doing so can often create the greatest impact. Not only the look of a website can be improved but its feel can as well. A website featuring a friendly look and feel is always good for business.

This redesign approach can easily be accomplished with a pre-built website, and by doing so you can often take the visual change to a whole new level. Since Be Theme’s collection of templates covers more than 30 different industries, picking the one for given industry type ensures your new color scheme will be current with the latest industry trends and user expectations. Read the rest of this entry »

You might be building a website for your own needs and doing all the work yourself. In this case, you may think there’s no need for a collaboration tool to smooth out your workflow. Still, having one or more extra pairs of eyes looking over your work can be beneficial.

It’s a different story for the design and development teams. There, quality communication and collaboration are often obligatory. This is especially if budget overruns and missed deadlines are to be avoided.

There’s a host of different collaboration tools available. Some are better than others. But the key is to find one that fits in with whom you intend to collaborate and how you plan to go about doing it.

We’ve rounded up several of the best collaboration tools on the market, one of which should be perfect for you.

Many tools treat collaboration as an extra, although necessary activity. Your team goes about its business and uses the collaborating tool on an as-needed basis. With Mason, product design, build, deployment and collaboration are managed from a single platform.

Mason’s front-end-as-a-service capability offers a better way to build, not only in terms of its drag and drop building-block approach, but also in terms of how easy it makes it for teams to interact and keep all the data and information in one secure place and available on demand. Collaboration couldn’t be easier.

Mason disassembles and reassembles digital products. By doing so, design and development are much easier to control, and the deployed products are much easier to maintain or modify. Non-tech types can make minor changes to a product and avoid having to repeat the deployment cycle in doing so. Read the rest of this entry »

What does it take to have a decent portfolio? You will definitely need the right tools and a fair amount of creativity. Extra creativity isn’t something that someone can easily come up with. But there are some top-of-the-line WordPress themes that can help you. They are to some degree portfolio oriented. so they can take up the slack.

So, the good news is that you don’t have to be a web design wizard. You also do not have to be brilliantly artistic to create an amazing portfolio. Here are the themes that can lead the way in helping you create an amazing portfolio to showcase your work. They will present your products in a way that will encourage users to stop and study.

Multi-purpose, blazing-fast, and very powerful compared to other WordPress themes are all apt descriptions of Porto. This Bootstrap4-based WordPress theme features a speed optimized wizard for producing the excellent site performance that makes it a better choice for your next eCommerce or portfolio website design.

Porto’s popularity over the past several years comes as no surprise as its authors have made it a point to follow the latest design trends, adhere to the best coding practices, and continuously make improvements in all aspects of this theme’s design.

Porto is 100% mobile responsive. With a host of demos and design options, it provides the ultimate in eCommerce and portfolio website functionality, it features Visual Composer and Revolution Slider, and it’s compatible with tons of plugins. Other features include header, menu, and breadcrumb options, and page and post layout configuration options and settings.

Porto features a variety of blog and shop pages in addition to its 19 portfolio pages, and there are some amazing ways in which you can put sliders to effective use in your home pages, portfolios, or blog posts.

With its 350+ pre-built websites, the largest selection on the market, and the wide-ranging and comprehensive variety of features it places at your disposal, BeTheme is an ideal choice for creating any type of portfolio website you have in mind, or any other type of website for that matter.

Be’s Muffin Builder and its powerful Options Panel working in combination with a variety of header options, shortcodes, design elements, grid and color schemes and many other options, settings, and special effects make it easy to build a portfolio website in as little as 4 hours. All you need is your ideas and your content. BeTheme takes care of the rest.

Be is responsive and SEO friendly and you don’t have to worry about coding as none is required. The documentation you’ll receive and the support you can expect are both reflective of Be’s belief in helping its customers. Read the rest of this entry »

Taking appointments might seem like a minor task. After all, it’s simply a matter of picking up the phone or answering an email.

The reality is that doing so takes a lot of your available time. It also takes away your business’s money. In addition, managing those appointments can take up even more time and cost you more money.

Manually taking and managing appointments can also be a source of problems. Appointments can’t be made during non-business hours. If you happen to be away from the phone it could cause a potential client to lose patience and look elsewhere.

Another problem — people sometimes forget an appointment.

Put a flawless automated booking specialist like Amelia in place. Like that, you can avoid all these problems.

1. What is Amelia?

Once you install Amelia, you’ll wish you had something like it years ago. Amelia is the brainchild of Code Canyon’s best-selling wpDataTables’ Elite Author. The latter is credited with more than 17,000 licenses sold.

It was created with businesses in mind that depend on bookings and appointments. These are businesses like coaches, consulting firms, gyms and fitness clinics. Spas and beauty parlors are also in this list.

For it to be put to use in businesses like these the system must be easy to install and require no special training. That’s precisely the case with Amelia, and once set up, it’s 100% automated.

Clients can book appointments 24/7 from their computers and smartphones. They will be able to do so with just a few clicks. You will be in a position to view and manage your and your team’s appointments. You can set your own calendar from one impeccably organized place.Read the rest of this entry »